Monday, November 30, 2015

For decades now Europe has opened its arms and its borders
to Muslim refugees. It did so to assert its overweening idealism, its love for
humanity and its belief that all human cultures are essentially the same.

Those who wish to do the same should, reasonably, take a look at the evidence. How has the policy worked out in practice?

Andrew McCarthy offers a capsule summary of some of the
consequences of the policy:

The
jihad waged by radical Islam rips at France from within. The two mass-murder
attacks this year that finally induced President Francois Hollande to concede a
state of war are only what we see.

Unbound
by any First Amendment, the French government exerts pressure on the media to
suppress bad news. We do not hear much about the steady thrum of insurrection
in the banlieues: the thousands of torched automobiles, the violence against
police and other agents of the state, the pressure in Islamic enclaves to
ignore the sovereignty of the Republic and conform to the rule of sharia.

What
happens in France happens in Belgium. It happens in Sweden where much of Malmo,
the third largest city, is controlled by Muslim immigrant gangs — emergency
medical personnel attacked routinely enough that they will not respond to calls
without police protection, and the police in turn unwilling to enter without
back-up. Not long ago in Britain, a soldier was killed and nearly beheaded in
broad daylight by jihadists known to the intelligence services; dozens of
sharia courts now operate throughout the country, even as Muslim activists
demand more accommodations. And it was in Germany, which green-lighted Europe’s
ongoing influx of Muslim migrants, that Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep
Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new
Western countries is “a crime against humanity.”

So how
many of us look across the ocean at Europe and say, “Yeah, let’s bring some of
that here”

I suspect that it’s the time of year when you start thinking
about how you can best express your appreciation for all the work I put into writing the posts on this blog. It may not always seem like it, but putting up these
posts every day does require work.

If I may be so bold, you can express your appreciation by making a donation. If you glance at the left column of this page you will
see an orange oval-shaped button that says: Donate.

Click on it and the folks at Paypal will make it quick and easy to donate. If you don’t use Paypal, donations may be sent
to me directly, at:

Sunday, November 29, 2015

I had never heard of Oliver Emberton before this piece
popped up on one of my news feeds. It is dated from around a year ago, and is
brief. And yet, despite or perhaps because of its brevity, it vastly outshines
the everyday round of earnest entreaties by would-be moral philosophers.

Emberton’s common sense, down-to-earth approach is refreshing.
Well, more than refreshing. Compared to those who want us all to run off in
search of an ideal, to tilt at windmills, to seek a pot of gold at the end of a
rainbow, Emberton is tell you to get out of the clouds and get down to work.

The internet and the media are filled with whiners whose plaints amount to: why am I not more successful? To which Emberton offers his
first moral principle: The problem is not that life is unfair. The problem is
that you don’t know the rules. (Evidently, this also means that Emberton is
British.)

What are the rules?

First, “life is a competition.”

This might seem clear, but those who rail against Western
civilization tell us that since competition involves winners and losers, it is
inherently unfair and unjust. If we are all equal, how can some be more equal
than others?

In truth, if you refuse to compete, you are more likely to
lose. Then you will hate competition even more.

Emberton writes:

That
business you work for? Someone’s trying to kill it. That job you like? Someone
would love to replace you with a computer program. That girlfriend / boyfriend
/ high-paying job / Nobel Prize that you want? So does somebody else.

Uh, oh. The lesson is: don’t just coast along. Don’t waste
your time protesting about how unjust it is. If you want to achieve something
in life you should begin by understanding that other people want the same
thing. And that if you are going to beat them at the competition, you are
probably going to have to work harder than they do... assuming that
you have the talent to do so.

He continues:

We’re
all in competition, although we prefer not to realise it. Most achievements are
only notable relative to others. You swam more miles, or can dance better, or
got more Facebook Likes than the average. Well done.

It’s a
painful thing to believe, of course, which is why we’re constantly assuring
each other the opposite. “Just do your best”, we hear. “You’re only in
competition with yourself”. The funny thing about platitudes like that is they’re designed to make you try harder
anyway. If competition really didn’t matter, we’d tell struggling
children to just give up.

I will grant that the platitudes are designed to get you to
do your best, but in truth, telling children to do their best is also a
consolation. Instead we should be telling them to be the best at whatever they are
doing. I appreciate that we lie to children to motivate them, but at some point
the truth will out.

Rather than complain about life’s unfairness, you should engage
fully in the competition:

But
never fall for the collective delusion that there’s not a competition going on.
People dress up to win partners. They interview to win jobs. If you deny that
competition exists, you’re just losing. Everything in demand is on a
competitive scale. And the best is only available to those who are willing to
truly fight for it.

I would mention that in order to compete you also need to
learn how to cooperate with your partners and colleagues. Competition is not
mano-a-mano; it is team vs. team.

Emberton’s second rule is:

You are
judged by what you do not by what you think.

To which I would add, as he does, that your good intentions
and your good feelings are for naught if they are not accompanied by good
deeds. It’s all about your actions in the world, not the state of your soul.

Society
judges people by what they can do
for others. Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a
tumour, or make a room of strangers laugh? You’ve got value right there.

That’s
not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts.

“I’m a
good person”. “I’m ambitious”. “I’m better than this.” These idle impulses may
comfort us at night, but they’re not how the world sees us. They’re not even
how we see other people.

Well-meaning
intentions don’t matter. An internal sense of honour and love and duty count
for squat. What exactly can you
and have you done for the world?

The next time your therapist says that you should tell
yourself that you are a good person, you should ask yourself what you can do to
demonstrate to others that you are a good person or a great artist or a great
insurance salesman.

Emberton adds that your fame depends on the number of people
you impact. I take his point, but I do differentiate between fame and infamy. Celebrities impact large numbers of people,
but this does not, in my view, make them winners. If the whole world is
watching you make a blithering fool of yourself, this might make you rich, but
it will do nothing for your good name.

It’s possible to influence large numbers
of people for the worst. Infamy is not quite the same thing as fame. It does
not bring the same level of respect. Being a rich freak does not bring you to
have very many good friends.

In Emberton’s words:

Write
an unpublished book, you’re nobody. Write Harry Potter and the world wants to
know you. Save a life, you’re a small-town hero, but cure cancer and you’re a
legend. Unfortunately, the same rule applies to all talents, even unsavoury ones: get naked for one person
and you might just make them smile, get naked for fifty million people and you
might just be Kim Kardashian.

You may
hate this. It may make you sick. Reality doesn’t care. You’re judged by what
you have the ability to do, and the volume of people you can impact. If you
don’t accept this, then the judgement of the world will seem very unfair
indeed.

Emberton’s third rule: we should not mistake fairness for
self-interest.

I am modifying his expression slightly, but he is advising
people to stop thinking that if they don’t succeed, then life is unfair.
We are too prone to believe that once we puff up our self-esteem the world will
give us everything we want. Some day people will look back at this and ask: whatever
were we thinking?

In a cartoon illustration, Emberton pictures a whiny
schoolboy saying:

I’ve
sent her a thousand photos of my junk. Why won’t she love meeee?

The question answers itself.

Emberton explains what’s wrong with high self-esteem:

Take a
proper look at that person you fancy but didn’t fancy you back. That’s a complete person. A person with years of
experience being someone completely different to you. A real person who
interacts with hundreds or thousands of other people every year.

Now
what are the odds that among all that, you’re automatically their first pick
for love-of-their-life? Because – what – you exist? Because you feel something for them? That might
matter to you, but their decision is not about you.

Similarly
we love to hate our bosses and parents and politicians. Their judgements are
unfair. And stupid. Because they don’t agree with me! And they should! Because
I am unquestionably the greatest authority on everything ever in the whole
world!

And this means: get over yourself. Emberton does not use the
term but he is saying that you should get over your hypersensitivity and stop
being so thin-skinned:

But
however they make you feel,
the actions of others are not some cosmic judgement on your being.

So, life isn’t fair. Emberton explains his final rule:

Can you
imagine how insane life would be if it actually was ‘fair’ to everyone? No-one
could fancy anyone who wasn’t the love of their life, for fear of breaking a
heart. Companies would only fail if everyone who worked for them was evil.
Relationships would only end when both partners died simultaneously. Raindrops
would only fall on bad people.

Most of
us get so hung up on how we think the world should work that we can’t see how it does. But facing that
reality might just be the key to unlocking your understanding of the world, and
with it, all of your potential.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

As I reported on November 25, Jonathan Haidt was shocked to
discover that politically correct teachers and administrators in excellent high
schools were indoctrinating their students. They were teaching feminist dogma
as absolute truth and were demeaning and diminishing boys at the expense of
girls.

If you thought that that was bad, take a look at what is
being taught at one of New York City’s finest private schools, Ethical Culture
Fieldston School. Apparently, a sixth grade teacher decided to teach the
students that the swastika was a symbol of peace. Huh?

Sixth-graders
at an elite Bronx private school have been caught drawing swastikas in art
class, so administrators met with the kids — talking mainly about how the
symbols represent peace in some cultures.

One
parent who wishes not to be named said Jewish students have felt unsafe since
the images began popping up three weeks ago at Ethical Culture Fieldston
School, where tuition costs $45,100 a year.

In
addition to the swastikas, a notebook was found at the middle school campus
with the words “Hitler Rocks!” scrawled on the front, the parent said.

Parents, many of whom, one imagines, are Jewish, protested,
so the administration held a meeting to clear the air:

Administrators
decided to address the apparent anti-Semitism by holding a grade-wide meeting.

Parents
say teachers spent nearly 12 of the 15 minutes on a PowerPoint presentation on
how the swastika was still considered a sacred symbol — while only briefly
mentioning how the Nazis had adopted it in the 1920s.

School
officials never once mentioned the Holocaust, a parent said.

When
asked what they learned, the kids simply said, “It wasn’t a good idea to draw”
the swastikas.

It’s a
failure of an institution to educate,” one parent said. “Teachers and
administrators were calling for a town hall meeting, but instead, they chose to
do just sixth grade.

Obviously, this is appalling. It shows that anti-Semitism
has become acceptable in the American academy. In particular,
anti-Semitism has become acceptable to progressives and leftists..

To take a random example, last week an Israeli executive tried
to rent a car from Avis on the Upper West Side of Manhatten… traditionally a
notably Jewish neighborhood. The clerk and the manager rejected his application
because he had an Israeli passport. The manager even claimed that it was
company policy not to accept Israeli passports. Link here.

When the executive contacted Avis customer service, he was
told that Avis did accept Israeli passports. The Avis customer service representative explained it to the manager. At that point the manager and the
clerk declined to rent the car because they said that they did not like the way
the man had behaved.

You might think that these Avis employees would have been
sanctioned for their behavior. They were not. As of the most recent report,
Avis was defending them.

The progressive left, even in Jewish neighborhoods, has
become anti-Israeli, and, by extension, anti-Semitic. Let’s go back to
Fieldston, which held an Israel-Palestine Day a couple of years ago. Here is
the way one source described it:

At
Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a prep school in New York, administrators
held an Israel-Palestine Day and, under the pretense of
"evenhandedness," invited Rashid Khalidi and Tony Judt as featured
speakers to represent "both sides" of the conflict. Both Khalidi and
Judt believe the state of Israel should not exist. Rabbi Avi Weiss, one of the
panelists, withdrew from the conference upon learning about the contents and
opted instead to organize a counter-demonstration. The school refused to allow
a single pro-Israel speaker at this event. Among the invited speakers were
noted anti- Israel advocates Sara Roy from Harvard University, Kenneth
Roth from Human Rights Watch and Fawaz Gerges from Georgetown University.
Meanwhile, teachers instructed students not to speak to the protesters or the
media, and the school's Principal announced at the end of the conference that
they just heard a "comprehensive" analysis of the Middle East
conflict from distinguished speakers and to remember that "the protesters
are outnumbered." This event drew strong criticism from the Zionist
Organization of America (ZOA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and several
politicians.

Of course, those liberals who find this offensive have only
themselves to blame. As long as high schools that purvey anti-Semitism are
supported by the parents who send their children there, the problem will
persist. From my limited interviews I have gotten the impression that the
schools do what they please because parents are afraid to do more than
complain. They are afraid that they will damage their children’s prospects for
getting into a good university.

What is the source of the problem? As I have occasionally
remarked, we live in the Age of Obama. The president’s contempt for all things
Israeli has created a cultural climate in which anti-Semitism is again
acceptable.

And the president wants to bring more anti-Semites into the
country. Interestingly, the Daily Mail reported this morning on the chaos
being visited on Germany by the flood of Syrian refugees. Among the cultural
qualities they are bringing with them: misogyny and anti-Semitism.

Now, with the support of the misguided Jews who compare
these refugees to the Jews fleeing Nazism in the 1930s, President Obama wants
to bring more Syrians into the country… just in case we are running low on
anti-Semites.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam famously declared that our
excessive individualism had produced a society where people go bowling alone.
David Brooks wrote this morning that “we live in an individualistic age.”

In a multicultural world where people do not have the same
customs, the same manners and the same mores, it is inevitable that they feel alone and isolated. In a world where therapy has long touted the advantage
of getting touch with your own feelings, it is not surprising that people
suffer from anomie.

For some people it manifests itself as social anxiety. While
trying to glory in their transcendent individuality they feel anxious about
going out in public, about having to deal with other people. They fear these
encounters, perhaps because they expect to be greeted with hostility or even to
be ignored.

One suspects that psychiatrists have a pill for this, though
it is not obvious that the pill does anything more than allay the anxiety. It does
not get you up and out and into the social whirl.

Some therapists will tell you to activate your emotional
intelligence by getting in touch with your feelings and by trying to tune in to
the feelings of other people.

Of course, the more you introspect the more you will be
detaching yourself from other people. If the best you can do is to feel their
feelings and to want them to feel yours, you will be avoiding the commerce that
constitutes human interactions. Thus, you will be aggravating your condition,
not treating it.

Now, Melissa Dahl reports on new research that suggests a
not-too-surprising treatment for social anxiety: be nice to people.

But she does not really mean: being nice in the being nice
sense of the term. She means, as the researchers suggest, doing something nice
for someone else, doing what used to be called good works or good deeds.

We should not emphasize whether you
are or are not nice but whether you perform certain actions that count as nice.
Being and doing are not the same thing. If the best you can do is to be nice,
in the sense of having warm fuzzy nice feelings for people, then the treatment
will not work. But if you perform good deeds toward other people and do it
whether you feel it or not, you will benefit from the activity. You will
benefit more when you make it a habit.

You will see that I am faithfully presenting Dahl’s thought:

…social
psychologists at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University
recently found that when socially anxious people were encouraged to perform
little acts of kindness — doing a roommate's dishes, mowing a neighbor's lawn —
they reported less daily social anxiety one month after starting the little
experiment in niceness, when compared to others who did not undertake the
doing-good-deeds assignment.

Jennifer
L. Trew and Lynn E. Alden split 115 undergraduates into three groups: one that
would seek out ways to be kind to others; another that would confront their
social anxiety by doing the very things that made them nervous (like striking
up a conversation with their neighbor, or asking someone to join them for
lunch), in a kind of exposure therapy; and a final group that served as the
control condition, who were told to keep a record of their daily lives for one
month….

In the
end, the people who had focused on kindness for the month experienced the
biggest drops in social anxiety, when compared to the exposure group and the
control group; the kindness group also reported bigger drops in avoidance after
the duration of the experiment.

One would have expected that the exposure group would also
experience a drop in social anxiety, but it makes sense that they did not
improve as much as did those who made a habit of doing acts of kindness. It’s
not so much about overcoming fear as learning how to interact with other people
on the most simple level.

Also importantly, people who focus on themselves, who ponder
their emotions, who get in touch with their feelings, who work on themselves,
become more anxious. You might even believe that certain forms of therapy are
designed to produce social anxiety.

Dahl concludes:

Previous
research has indicated that there is a kind of symbiotic relationship
between self-focused attention and social anxiety, in that anxiety makes people
more likely to draw their focus inward — likewise, focusing on yourself seems
to increase anxiety. This new finding may point to a way out of that vicious,
anxious circle. Doing small good deeds for other people naturally turns your
focus outward, which may leave less room for obsessive self-reflection.

The funny thing is: there is nothing new about this idea. Western
religions have been recommending this for millennia. One suspects that social
anxiety is one of the prices of an increasingly secularized world.

As for the religious basis, note Proverbs 21:3:

To do
what is right and just is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice.

And Jesus said in Matthew 5.16:

Let
your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify
your Father which is in heaven.

And from the Epistle to James 2:24:

Ye see
then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.

Of course, these precepts have been subject to controversy.
Debates have raged about whether good deeds or faith put you on the path to
Heaven. Perhaps we can agree that doing good deeds toward other people produces
a sense of community and works because it fulfills another Biblical injunction:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

After all, your kind gesture toward another person makes it
far more likely that the other person will reciprocate with a kind gesture. One
understands that not everyone returns favors, but if you make enough kind
gestures you will likely to find other people to be more welcoming. They will
look forward to seeing you, not dread your presence.

This suggests that those who withdraw from the world to
contemplate their feelings are sending out a “don’t tread on me” signal to others.
Their social anxiety might reflect unfriendly looks and gestures they receive
when they refuse to interact with other people. For all we know they might have
more control than they think over how they are received in society.

Arthur Brooks makes some similar points in a column he
penned for Thanksgiving. He too recommends that you make kind gestures and do
good deeds regardless of whether or not you are feeling kind, nice or grateful.
And he suggests making it a habit.

He writes:

Make
gratitude a routine, independent of how you feel — and not just once each
November, but all year long.

What deeds would count as kind. Brooks lists some:

Next,
move to “exterior gratitude,” which focuses on public expression. The
psychologist Martin Seligman, father of the field known as “positive
psychology,” gives some practical suggestions on how to do this. In his best
seller “Authentic Happiness,” he recommends that readers systematically express
gratitude in letters to loved ones and colleagues. A disciplined way to put
this into practice is to make it as routine as morning coffee. Write two short
emails each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what
they do.

We should understand that different relationships
with different people require different gestures of gratitude. It helps that the recipients of said
emails have actually done something to deserve the gratitude. Yet, Seligman and
Brooks are saying that the good deeds need not be extravagant. They need merely
be nice… like bringing your wife flowers for no reason. One understands that giving flowers to female colleague does not mean the same thing.

Brooks continues, advising us not to follow our feelings:

This
Thanksgiving, don’t express gratitude only when you feel it. Give thanks
especially when you don’t feel it. Rebel against the emotional “authenticity”
that holds you back from your bliss.

Stuart Taylor suggests that there has been insufficient
discussion of the proximate cause of the current wave of campus protest. Had he
been reading this blog he would know that I have on several occasions made the
point that minority students at major college campuses have encountered problems because they have been admitted under affirmative action programs and
thus find themselves incapable of competing with Asian and white students. They
are, as Taylor and Richard Sander argued in a recent book, mismatched.

One remarks that college administrators have missed this point completely.

Now Taylor explains it all in great detail and his analysis
is well worth our continued attention. I can add very little, and so will quote
him at considerable length:

After saying that there has not been enough discussion of
the use of racial preferences, Taylor describes the minority students who are
leading the protests:

Most
are, rather, victims
of the very large admissions preferences that set up racial-minority
students for academic struggle at the selective universities that have
cynically misled them into thinking they are well qualified to compete with
classmates who are, in fact, far stronger academically.

The
reality is that most good black and Hispanic students, who would be
academically competitive at many selective schools, are not competitive at the more selective schools that they
attend.

That’s
why it takes very large racial preferences to get them admitted. An inevitable
result is that many black and (to a lesser extent) Hispanic students cannot
keep up with better-prepared classmates and rank low in their classes no matter
how hard they work.

What are the consequences of this mismatch?

Studies
show that this academic “mismatch effect” forces
them to drop science and other challenging courses; to move into soft,
easily graded, courses disproportionately populated by other preferentially
admitted students; and to abandon career hopes such as engineering and pre-med.
Many lose
intellectual self-confidence and become unhappy even if they avoid
flunking out.

This
depresses black performance at virtually all selective schools because of what
experts call the cascade
effect. Here’s how it works, as Richard Sander and I demonstrated in a 2012
book, :

Only 1
to 2 percent of black college applicants emerge from high school well-qualified
academically for (say) the top Ivy League colleges. Therefore, those schools
can meet their racial admissions targets only by using large preferences. They
bring in black students who are well qualified for moderately elite schools
like (say) the University of North Carolina, but not for the Ivies that recruit
them. This leaves schools like UNC able to meet their own racial targets only
by giving large preferences to black students who are well qualified for less
selective schools like (say) the University of Missouri but not for UNC. And so
on down the selectivity scale.

As a
result, experts agree, most black students at even moderately selective schools
— with high school preparation and test scores far below those of their
classmates — rank well below the middle of their college and grad school
classes, with between 25% and 50% ranking in the bottom tenth. That’s a very
bad place to be at any school.

The consequences are not merely academic. They are also
social:

This,
in turn, increases these students’ isolation and self-segregation from the
higher-achieving Asians and whites who flourish in more challenging courses. At
least one careful study shows that students are more likely to become
friends with peers who are similar in academic accomplishment.

Taylor notes that extra effort on the part of the mismatched
students cannot close the gap:

[Minority
students] who may work heroically during the first semester only to be lost in
many classroom discussions and dismayed by their grades.

As they
start to see the gulf between their own performance and that of most of their
fellow students, dismay can become despair. They soon realize that no matter how
hard they work, they will struggle academically.

But due
to racial preferences, they find themselves for the first time in their lives
competing against classmates who have a huge head start in terms of previous
education, academic ability, or both.

Researchers
have shown that racial preference recipients developnegative perceptions of
their own academic competence, which in turn harms their performance and even
their mental health, through “stereotype
threat” and other problems. They may come to see themselves as failures in
the eyes of their families, their friends, and themselves.

Next, he offers a case study:

Consider
the case of a student whom I will call Joe, as told in Mismatch. He breezed through high
school in Syracuse, New York, in the top 20 percent of his class. He had been
class president, a successful athlete, and sang in gospel choir. He was easily
admitted to Colgate, a moderately elite liberal arts college in rural New York;
no one pointed out to Joe that his SAT scores were far below the class median.

Joe
immediately found himself over his head academically, facing far more rigorous
coursework than ever before. “Nobody told me what would be expected of me
beforehand,” Joe later recalled. “I really didn’t know what I was getting into.
And it all made me feel as if I wasn’t smart enough.”

But
just as surprising and upsetting was the social environment in which Joe found
himself. “I was immediately stereotyped and put into a box because I was
African American,” he recalled. “And that made it harder to perform. People
often made little derogatory comments.…There was a general feeling that all
blacks on campus were there either because they were athletes or they came
through a minority recruitment program.… That was just assumed right away.”

Of course, the nation is so thoroughly wedded to the notion
that affirmative action programs will level the playing field that they are
incapable of seeing the truth:

Not
many mismatched students complain — even if they figure out — that the root of
their problems is that they are not well-qualified to compete with their classmates.
The universities, the media, and others do their best to conceal and deny this
connection. And it is human nature to seek less humiliating, more sinister
explanations.

It is, unfortunately, also human nature to refuse to accept
that one’s policies are a failure. It’s not just that the administrators do not
want to humiliate the mismatched minority students—though that is certainly the
case—but that they do not want to admit that they themselves and the policies
they have wholeheartedly supported have produced the problem:

The
grievance-prone college culture offers ready targets for these frustrated
students to blame for their plight: wildly exaggerated and sometimes fabricated
instances of racism, trivial perceived “microaggressions,” and the very real
racial isolation that is largely due to racially preferential admissions — all
leading to a supposedly hostile learning environment.

Another
common reaction is to withdraw into racial enclaves within the campus. Many
universities encourage this by creating black dormitories and even by assigning
entering students to them.

As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, one easy
solution would be for minority students to refuse to apply or attend
colleges where they will be mismatched, but to aim for schools in which they
can excel. That choice, after all, is wholly theirs. Just because you can be you are accepted by Harvard does not mean that you have to go to Harvard.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Thanksgiving is the most American of American holidays. A
communal feast, celebrated in roughly the same way throughout the country, it should be a time for affirming our gratitude. We are not only
grateful for the bountiful harvest but for being one people living in a great
nation.

As I wrote those words I could not help but thinking that
they will instantly identify me as a relic. Today, more and more people are dreading Thanksgiving. It seems no longer to be a ritual meal that brings us
all together, that unites us and makes us one. Many of our fellow citizens are
girding their loins, preparing to see the convivial and congenial dinner table descend into a raucous and dyspeptic exercise in political argument.

One suspects that it’s a new kind of diet. Turning
Thanksgiving dinner into a cacophonous din is guaranteed to diminish your appetite.

Things have become so bad and so generalized that various
organizations, from Vox.com to the Democratic National Committee to the Hillary
Clinton campaign are putting out talking points that young people can use to
debate their ignorant and superannuated elders. One caveat here: if you are a
millennial and you rattle off DNC talking points at Thanksgiving dinner you
will immediately affirm everyone’ caricature of millennials as opinionated
boors.

Heather Wilhelm is correct to note that we no longer
have social skills. We no longer know how to get along, even for the short time
it takes to consume a communal feast. In the heat of a passionate argument over
climate change, Islamophobia and Syrian immigrants, table manners will
degenerate. How can you master the art of chewing with your mouth closed when
you feel compelled to blurt out the definitive talking point about campus
insurgencies? Then again, why did you we study all of that critical theory if
not to replace table manners with a passionate commitment to big ideas?

Putting politics aside, just for an instant, one is
painfully aware of the fact that many people believe that arguing is healthy.
Many people believe that couples should engage in an occasional fight, as long
as they fight fair. Many philosophically minded therapists even believe in the dialectic, in the clash
of contrary opinions. They imagine that a synthesis will arise from the conflict between thesis and antithesis. They believe that it is unhealthy to restrain
yourself, to bottle up emotions, to keep it under control. Thus, they want you to let it rip. They tell themselves that the full-throated expression of their opinions will
naturally produce a new synthesis that will make everyone happy.

They ought to recall the Biblical injunction, from Luke, 11,
17:

Every
kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided
against a house falleth.

Abraham Lincoln said it a bit differently, but the thought
is the same. There is no virtue in arguing and fighting over Thanksgiving. At
times, argument is inevitable. At times, fighting is required. And yet, there
is no superior virtue in turning even the most agreeable communal meals into a brawl.

The unfortunate point, Wilhelm argues, is that life has
become so politicized that we no longer think it is even worth trying to get
along with each other.

Wilhelm analyzes the problem:

Politics,
for many, has morphed into personal identity. Just look at colleges today,
where opposing political sentiments or offensive statements can make students
collapse like panicked, half-hearted origami. And hey, it makes sense: If
politics is the be-all and end-all of life, and you honestly believe we can
build a utopia buttressed by bureaucratic control, your personal worth, by
logical extension, is ultimately based upon your political beliefs. No offense
is too petty to let stand; no Thanksgiving dinner can be left in peace.

One is reminded of another Biblical verse: “vanity of
vanities; all is vanity.”

There is something monumentally vain and exhibitionistic
about displaying one’s ill-informed opinions at the dinner table. And yet, if
the nation’s political and cultural debates are being led by Leonardo di Caprio
and Amy Schumer, why shouldn’t everyone believe that he has a constitutional right
to ruin Thanksgiving dinner by expressing his feelings, tactlessly and
inconsiderately.

How does it happen that everything has become politics? How
does it happen that we have become so politicized that we identify, not as
Americans, but as Republicans and Democrats? Why are we more loyal to our
political party than we are to the nation? Doesn’t politicized identity look
like a symptom of an absence of patriotism? People no longer believe in America;
they belong to factions. They do not believe in e pluribus unum, out of many, one; but believe in multiculturalism,
out of one, many.

Worse yet, we no longer have a set of rules that define good behavior and set standards toward which we
should aspire. Unfortunately, we tossed out all the rules of good behavior when
we tossed out religion, when we replaced it with science.

However much you love science, there is no such thing, David
Hume wrote around 250 years ago, as a science of moral principles. Science
tells us what is; ethics tells us what we should or should not do. The two do
not meet. Without religion, without a moral foundation in texts that are taken
to be sacred we have made a fetish of dissension.

In the absence of patriotism and in the absence of
Judeo-Christian values we have become cult followers. The cults might have involve political parties or they might make us belong to movements like
psychoanalysis and Marxism and scientology.

Without religion, people do not take seriously the
injunction to love their neighbor, to bless those who curse them, to do unto
others as you would have others do unto you. If they did there were be fewer arguments
and fewer fights over Thanksgiving dinner.

For many of those who dread a politicized holiday, today’s Thanksgiving dinner is merely a prelude
to what really matters: football.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

If you think college is bad, wait until to find out what is going on in
America’s elite high schools. The mania over political correctness and victim
culture does not begin in college. It begins, as Prof. Jonathan Haidt
discovered, in the indoctrination mills that prepare children for college. It’s
a bit much to say that they are schools at all.

Parents are clearly worried about the abuse that is systematically
visited on boys. They are surely also worried about the way that their
daughters are being turned into a revolutionary vanguard. Whatever you think
about helicopter parenting, you might consider that parents might very well want to protect their children from the
leftist culture that prevails in high school.

Haidt describes a high school assembly that he had addressed in an upscale
suburban high school. After his talk, he was denounced and attacked by female
students while all the male students, save one male feminist, kept quiet.

Later, he spoke to an adult audience, comprised of parents of many of
the children he had spoken to earlier:

So if
these teenagers are coming into political consciousness inside of a “moral
matrix” that is uniformly leftist, there will always be anger directed at those
who disrupt that consensus.

That
night, after I gave a different talk to an adult audience, there was a
reception at which I spoke with some of the parents. Several came up to me to
tell me that their sons had told them about the day’s events. The boys finally
had a way to express and explain their feelings of discouragement. Their
parents were angry to learn about how their sons were being treated and…
there’s no other word for it, bullied
into submission by the girls, with the blessing of the teachers.

No more teaching. Incipient feminists bully the boys and the
boys have no right to say anything about it, lest they be denounced to the
thought police.

Haidt found the same atmosphere at a top New England prep
school:

Last summer
I had a conversation with some boys who attend one of the nation’s top prep
schools, in New England. They reported the same thing: as white males, they are
constantly on eggshells, afraid to speak up on any remotely controversial topic
lest they be sent to the “equality police” (that was their term for the
multicultural center). I probed to see if their fear extended beyond the
classroom. I asked them what they would do if there was a new student at their
school, from, say Yemen. Would they feel free to ask the student questions
about his or her country? No, they said, it’s too risky, a question could be
perceived as offensive.

It’s as though it isn’t enough to give poor grades to any
student who offers a dissenting opinion.
He must also be punished by having to undergo thought reform.

One must note that the feminist victory is pyrrhic. These
empowered girls will go off to college and will hook up with boys who will mistreat
them. When these girls decide go looking for relationships with boys, the boys
they have been beating down throughout their school years might not be
interested in anything more than using them for sex. When these liberated girls
sext pictures of their private parts to wanna-be boyfriends, the boys will probably not feel
a gentlemanly concern with keeping the images private. They will more likely pass them around the locker room.

Perhaps it is payback for the high school classes and
assemblies in which the boys were forced into silence.

One needs to ask whether these children are being prepared
for the real world, whether they are being taught what they need to know to
succeed.

Haidt has more than a few doubts:

As long
as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known
eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single
dimension of victims and victimizers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger
warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open
students’ minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who
don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t
share their values.

They used to be called high schools. Now they seem to be nothing more than indoctrination mills.

Charles Krauthammer on Special Report with Bret Baier last
night was commenting on President Obama’s statement connecting the terrorist
attack in Paris with the upcoming climate change conference in Paris:

I think
what Obama was saying is that if we don’t destroy our economies in order to
save the ocean from rising an inch or two a hundred years from now, the
terrorists have won.

Rudeness begets rudeness. Watching someone who is rude tends
to make you act rudely. Being treated rudely makes you more likely to treat
someone else rudely. It happens automatically, without your even being aware of
it.

If this happens in personal interactions, does the same thing
happen when the media is constantly exposing us to people who are acting
rudely? And what happens when politicians behave boorishly? Do these examples
tend to make us behave more rudely toward others? Do they promote bullying and
other forms of assaultive disrespect?

And, what happens to the culture when politicians are rude
and disrespectful to members of the opposition party? What happens when they
show more contempt than courtesy, when they demonize each other? Ought we to
conclude that these political leaders undermine social harmony?

Also, some forms of psychotherapy, in particular Freudian
psychoanalysis involve systematic rudeness. When you refuse to look your
patient in the eye, when you refuse to take what he says at face value, when
you give him the silent treatment, you are being monumentally rude. Does this
promote good behavior or bad behavior? One must note that Freud would have
considered the latter to be more in touch with the fundamental truth of human
nature. See Janet Malcolm’s seminal essay: “Therapeutic Rudeness.”

Scientific
American reports on the research without drawing too many
conclusions and without applying the results to different cultural situations.
Which is well and good. We need to evaluate the data before drawing a conclusion.

Researchers from the University of Florida were not
surprised to discover that we tend to emulate our betters. If someone who has
fame and fortune and power acts like a boorish lout, he is inducing others to
do the same. If you associate certain behaviors with success, you will happily
adopt them. And yet, we also imitate and mirror behaviors when we are relating to our peers, to our colleagues or friends. And it does
not matter that much whether you have simply witnessed the rude behavior or
have been its target.

New research by
Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum, and Amir Erez at the University of Florida takes
that same first step in identifying a different kind of contagious menace:
rudeness. In a series of studies, Foulk and colleagues demonstrate that being
the target of rude behavior, or even simply witnessing rude behavior, induces
rudeness. People exposed to rude behavior tend to have concepts associated with
rudeness activated in their minds, and consequently may interpret ambiguous but
benign behaviors as rude. More significantly, they themselves are more likely
to behave rudely toward others, and to evoke hostility, negative affect, and
even revenge from others.

Prior studies had addressed the effect of emulation. We tend
to emulate our betters because we associate their behaviors with success. But,
the new research has shown that the imitation effect applies even with our
peers:

In
addition, in most previous studies the destructive behavior was modeled by
someone with a higher status than the observer. These extreme negative
behaviors may thus get repeated because (a) they are quite salient and (b) the
observer is consciously and intentionally trying to emulate the behavior of
someone with an elevated social status.

And,

Foulk
and colleagues wondered about low-intensity negative behaviors, the kind you
are likely to encounter in your everyday interactions with coworkers, clients,
customers, and peers. We spend far more of our time with coworkers and clients
than we do with supervisors, and so their actions, if contagious, are likely to
have a much broader effect on us. Evidence for negative contagion among peers
and customers might also suggest that there is more than one mode of infection.
We are far less likely to intentionally base our behavior on our customers than
we are on our bosses, and thus any behavioral contagion observed in these
settings is likely driven by unconscious, unintentional processes rather than
by purposeful imitation. Perhaps we can “catch” behaviors without even trying.

Being polite to your customers, your clients, your friends
and neighbors contributes to social harmony through the contagion effect. Being
rude induces rudeness in others, and it happens without one's being conscious of
the process:

These
findings suggest that exposure to rudeness seems to sensitize us to rude
concepts in a way that is not intentional or purposeful, but instead happens
automatically.

The researchers showed different videos to test subjects.
The subjects were then shown a rude email. Their reaction to the email was
colored significantly by the video they had seen:

However,
the type of video participants observed early in the study did affect their
interpretation of and response to the rude email. Those who had seen the polite
video adopted a benign interpretation of the moderately rude email and
delivered a neutral response, while those who had seen the rude video adopted a
malevolent interpretation and delivered a hostile response. Thus, observing
rude behaviors, even those committed by coworkers or peers, resulted in greater
sensitivity and heightened response to rudeness.

Therefore, it is not just about being treated rudely. You
will behave more rudely merely by witnessing bad behavior:

Collectively,
the data from Foulk and colleagues highlight the dangers of low-intensity
negative behaviors, even those that are merely witnessed rather than personally
experienced. With negative behaviors, the witness becomes the perpetrator, just
as the person who touches a doorknob recently handled by a flu sufferer can
themselves get sick and infect others. No conscious intent in necessary, and
the contagion may last for days. Unfortunately, unlike the flu, there currently
is no known inoculation for this contagion.

What conclusion can we draw? Perhaps the studies show that
we are prone to harmonize with others, even when their conversation amounts to
a cacophonous din. Surely, it is taxing to indulge in that level of rudeness,
but we seem to be programmed to get along with other people and to speak to
them in a language they understand. One suspects that people who adopt rude
behaviors are not trying to avenge themselves or to return the abuse as much as
to try to connect with someone who is behaving badly. Or else, they might be trying to adopt the posture that
seems to be socially acceptable.

What is the solution? Perhaps it lies in the Biblical
injunction: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Which is not the
same as: do unto others as others do unto you.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

As I have been at pains to point out, the demonstrations
roiling American campuses today have multiple causes.

The larger cause is President Obama’s failed presidency.
Just as the Red Guards were mobilized to cover up the failure of Mao Zedong’s
Great Leap Forward, so too are young campus radicals shifting the blame
from blacks who are failing to the whites who have supposedly induced them to
fail.

David Goldman believes that the black students are accusing
white students of practicing witchcraft on them.

The more immediate cause involves racial preferences and the
mania over diversity. Colleges have decided that they must have a certain
number of minority students, regardless of whether they are qualified or can do
the work. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor have called this a mismatch.

This puts minority students in
situations where they cannot compete and are considered to be inferior. In many
cases they do not receive degrees. It other cases they are passed through the
system. Since everyone knows that these students have been admitted to fulfill
racial preferences, they are not respected on campus and never really feel that
they belong.

Yesterday, David Goldman, aka Spengler provided further
evidence of the costs of affirmative action. He points out that:

… black
American college students, especially men, are failing at a catastrophic rate.

This chart says it all.

Unfortunately, no one has really suggested that students who
fail might be responsible for their failure. If these students know that they
are going to be admitted to college under a racial preference, they should apply to colleges where they can compete effectively. Just because you can get
in to Harvard does not mean that you have to apply to Harvard or to go to
Harvard.

One recalls the black student who was accepted to all eight
Ivy League schools but who chose to go to the Honors College at the University
of Alabama. Beyond the fact that he will graduate debt free, he will surely get
an excellent education, one that is not marred by administrative meddling. He
will be respected as one of the brightest students and will be able to root for
a considerably better football team.

If a minority student goes to an Ivy League school, one
where his SAT scores (on a 1600 scale) are roughly 400 points below those of
Asian students, he should recognize that he will have to work harder and
longer in order to compete.

The national conversation, of course, blames everyone but
the colleges and the students. But, when you tell students that they have no
personal responsibility for their failures, they are going to be less inclined
to work hard and to achieve. If they were behind to begin with, the
demonstrations double down on their handicap.

Many people have tried to explain the black failure rate.
And naturally, they have tended to find ways to rationalize it and to blame
white people. Spengler quotes the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

Clearly, the racial climate at some colleges and
universities is more favorable toward African Americans than at other campuses.
A nurturing environment for black students is almost certain to have a positive
impact on black student retention and graduation rates. Brown University, for
example, although often troubled by racial incidents, is famous for its efforts
to make its campus a happy place for African Americans. In contrast, the
University of California at Berkeley has had its share of racial turmoil in
recent years. The small number of black students on campus as a result of the
abolishment of race-sensitive admissions has made many African Americans on
campus feel unwelcome. This probably contributes to the low black student
graduation rate at Berkeley.

Now the college campus must be a “happy
place” for students of color. Doesn’t this sound somewhat infantilizing?
Strictly speaking the word “abolishment” exists, but one does better to use the
normal word: abolition. As for the situation of black students at Berkeley, one
suspects that the stigma imposed on them by affirmative action is alive and
well… regrettably so. And one should note that Berkeley has one of the nation’s
largest contingents of overachieving Asian students.

In any case the Journal blames it
on the black family:

High dropout rates appear to be primarily caused
by inferior K-12 preparation and an absence of a family college tradition,
conditions that apply to a very large percentage of today’s college-bound
African Americans.

Surely, there is truth to this
analysis. Spengler adds that we need to take into account the high incidence of
broken homes and out-of-wedlock births in the African-American community.

Moreover, there is the problem of
multiculturalism. Today, young people are encouraged to affirm their own
culture, to be proud of it, even if that culture does not prevail at Harvard or
Yale.

One suspects that it is part of
the problem. Young people are notoriously prone to join cliques. Ivy League
students who went to the same prep school or who come from the same
neighborhood are more likely to hang out together. Surely, Chinese students hang
out with Chinese students and Indian students spend more time with Indian
students.

Students from different cliques might
socialize in class and in study groups—but that assumes they are taking the
same classes. They have an equal opportunity to participate in class, to
impress their peers or not, as the case may be. And students from different
cliques live together in dorms, take their meals together and so on.

If the ambient culture encourages
conformity—that is, uniformity of dress and grooming, uniformity of table
manners and proper classroom decorum—it will be easier to feel that one
belongs.

If a student chooses not to conform,
perhaps because he insists on affirming the value of his own culture, people
from different cultures will avoid him and make him feel like he is not one of
the crowd.

The current discussion, if we
should even call it that, presupposes that black students cannot take
responsibility for their own achievements or lack of same. Of course, this is
disempowering, a counsel of despair.

How can the problem be solved?
The students and their guidance counselors should consider which schools are
best for them, not which schools they can get into. And it should encourage
them to work harder, spend more time in the library, spend more time learning
to conform to the ambient culture and spend less time fulminating about
injustices.